Gadgets & Gizmos

Camera
I bought a new camera to celebrate my new job - a Nikon Coolpix P1. It's an awesome camera, and I'm really happy with it. I've had a Fuji FinePix 1400 for about 5 years, and it takes really good pictures (it's only 1.3 megapixels, but the sharpness and the colour are excellent). But it's started to develop some problems, like it sometimes just freezes and you have to turn it off and on a couple times to get it to work again; also, one the battery cover catches has broken, so I think it's just a matter of time until the battery cover won't close at all. So those are my excuses for getting a new camera - truly, I just wanted P1 with all its cool features :-)

I'm not going to go into detail, since there are tons of really informative reviews on the net (my wireless connection is down right now, again, but do a google search and you'll find tons of great reviews). But basically, it's an 8 megapixel camera, with video (and sound, with the video - or you can attach a voice note to a photo). It's got a really good default point-and-click mode, or 16 pre-set modes. And there are various things you can set yourself, like aperture and white balance, but I trust the camera more than I trust myself, so I don't touch them :-) It's got face recognition autofocus, so if there's a face in your shot it will automatically focus on it; it's got anti-shake for the video mode (which works well - I went on a boat on the Thames, and the water was a bit rough; I tried to video it, and the stabiliser stabilised out the movement!). It's got a best shot selector, so can take a bunch of shots with varying settings and figure out which is the best; and a bunch of other stuff.

But the best part is that it's wireless! I haven't got it working yet - purely my fault, I haven't gotten around to it - but it'll be really cool to transfer photos to my laptop without digging out the cable, plugging it into the laptop, plugging it into the camera, dragging and dropping the pictures... it uses PictBridge to transfer the photos, and apparently you can transfer by date, or the selected photos, or only new photos that haven't been transferred yet - no more duplicates! (I tend to copy everything off, then not delete the photos on the camera - then next time, I copy everything again, get filename clashes, create a temp directory, copy them all... over and over. You don't want to see my directory structure).

It takes really good photos, too, and the movies are really high quality (up to 640 x 480 at 30fps), sharp and with good colour. Compared to getting a digital camcorder which takes good movies but only crappy digital stills, this takes excellent stills and good movies. Certainly replaces my need for a camcorder, but then I'm very much just a tourist-level camera user :-)

I bought mine at Jessops online, as the P1 is exclusive to Jessops in the UK - the price was better than in their physical store, and they were offering 50% off memory cards at the time, so I got a 1Gb SD card (the camera has, I think, 128Mb onboard).

Oops, almost forgot. I use (sometimes, when I get around to it), AlbumGV for annotating photos and grouping them into albums, but now that I have movies I figure I need something similar. So what I want to do is use the QuickTime API to write a C# app that will let you associate movie files with a note, group them into albums, and actually play the movies from within the app (with full pause/rewind/etc control, of course). Should be fun :-) And from there, I might even add support for still photos, eliminating the need for AlbumGV (which is a very good app, but why use 2 apps when you can write just one of your own?)

Update (30/04/2006): I really, really like this camera. It takes great photos, great movies, the wireless works great (I have to switch my internet wireless connection to manual first, since that's going through an access point while the camera connection is ad-hoc, so the internet connection has priority and keeps interrupting the camera connection, but that's minor). I rarely use anything other than the default point-and-click mode (although I use the zoom a lot, which doesn't really count since it's so simple), and I get great photos. The one thing that does bug me, though, and I'd appreciate it if anyone could give me an answer: how on earth can I get the date of the file written to the PC to have the date that the photo was taken, rather than the date it was transferred?! I don't necessarily transfer photos every day, so they end up having the wrong dates which is really annoying.

Update (28/02/2007): another update to say that I've had this camera for about a year now, and I still love it. There are four things that I think are the best buying decisions I ever made: my motorbike, my laptop, my phone/pda, and this camera. The laptop and pda, though, and to a lesser extent the bike, are cool because of the general class of what they are - having a laptop is really useful, but it could be any laptop. I love my laptop because having a laptop is great, not because having a Dell Latitude D510 is great. This camera, though, I love for itself - having any other digital camera wouldn't be as good as this one. It takes really great photos, whether you're taking a close-up in macro mode, normal distance photos (like of people), or scenic shots - the focus is always perfect and the photos come out crisp and sharp. I rarely use the scenes mode, because the automatic settings are so good. The colours are always true to life as well, and the panoramic assist mode is really great for those scenic shots - it's incredibly easy to use. The video isn't as great, but that's to be expected: it's only 640 x 480 after all; the frame rate is a bit slow, but overall it's still good. I would really recommend this camera to anyone, and after using it for a year, to still love it so much is quite a recommendation :-)

Cellphone
The other gadget I want to get is a new cellphone (or mobile, as it's called in the UK). My Motorola V300 is fine, but it's getting a bit battered and isn't 3G compatible - besides which, if I get a contract I get free new phone, and who could say no to that?

So my main motivation is really the contract - I'm on pay-as-you-go at the moment, which is great with Vodafone's Stop The Clock option for offpeak (offpeak, any call up to an hour long only gets charged for 3 minutes, at the offpeak rate!), but peak calls are really going to eat up my budget - I could get a contract with a bunch of minutes included for less than I'm using on pre-pay. (Hmm - maybe I should do a post about the cheapest ways to phone home from the UK. I'll make a mental note.)

So the option I'm looking at is T-Mobile's Flext Web'n'Walk - unlimited internet (GPRS or 3G), with £180 worth of calls or texts per month (not including international SMSs or calls, though) for I think about £32 if you order online (£42 normally). With that, you get either the Nokia N70 or the T-Mobile MDA Compact II CoPilot, which is a PDA phone with CoPilot, which is like a GPS mapping system (gives you directions to your destination). I'm not sure which is better:
Nokia N70:

• It's a nokia :-)
  
• It's 3G :-)
  

MDA:

• It's got CoPilot :-)
  
• It runs Windows :-)
  
• It's got MS Office :-)
  
• It's pink :-(
• It doesn't have a number keypad - to dial, you have to select from your address book or enter a number using the virtual keyboard :-(
• It's not 3G :-(
  

They both have all the standard stuff - camera, etc. Not sure what their relative sizes are, but I do want a small phone. I guess the question is: do I want a phone, or a PDA that I can take calls on?

Of course, the whole question is probably academic, since I doubt I could get a contract, at least via their online site. The questions they ask for the credit check are: how long have you lived at your current address? (about 3 weeks); how long have you had your bank account (about 3 weeks); how long have you been working for your current employer? (haven't actually started yet). Which doesn't inspire trust, I guess, never mind that back in SA I've two 2-year contracts, and had a bank account since forever, and can trace my address back to when I was born, here I have no history. I guess it's worth a try, though; maybe they don't really care too much unless your name is blacklisted. I'll wait till I've actually started work, though ;-)

That's it for now - should go to bed! Next time: how to phone SA from the UK, and the touristy stuff I've been doing.